In our life

truth is like a friend from a distant time

a memory we cherish

but one we don’t need

Nochrisis

 

Beyond good and evil, prelude to a philosophy of the future

By Friedrich Nietzsche

First chapter.

PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS.

4.

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori* belong), are the most indispensable to us; that without a recognition of logical fictions, with out a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life : that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has: thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

Translated by Helen Zimmerm

1909

*